I've been in several with damage about like this one from tree roots. I've been in two that were by far and away worse. One of those, I was living in at the time. 40"+ DBH cottonwood tree between the house and a canal. The tree was very small, probably, when the canal was built. Roots larger than 8" in diameter came through the basement wall at about 2:00 AM and we went outside to investigate. Sounded like a bomb going off. Took flashlight outside and looked down into the basement through the outside bulkhead entrance. Mud was up to the top of the water heater, which was electric (we actually still had hot water). Roots everywhere, they were under such tension that the entire foundation on the canal side of the house was destroyed... it was pulverized. Furnace was destroyed, so we shut the gas off. By noon, the house, which was tipped slightly when we packed everything of value up and took it to my brother's house, was sliding off of the foundation. The weight of the house was shearing the sill plate bolts right off, and the house was about to end up in the canal. Canal District equipment was already on site, and we gave them the OK to demolish the house before it slid into the canal and flooded everything upstream.
The other really bad one was a house that was on the market, that my wife and I looked at only because I was interested in the lot it sat on. My intention was to bulldoze the house and level the lot, if I could get it cheap enough. This one, not only had been strapped with red iron like the one in the video, but also had huge poured concrete buttress pillars 3' x 3' all along the wall where the driveway and the trees were. Trees were an oak, a silver maple and something else that I don't recall. Couple of elms, I think. Driveway was a goner, but the owners hadn't replaced it because the local contractors wanted big money to deal with those big roots, and a couple had even said they wouldn't do it until the trees were removed. This place was a disaster waiting to happen. Floors of the house were so bad, uneven and tipped every which way, that we called it the Pinball Machine house... if you dropped a bowling ball on the floor, it would probably still be bouncing off the walls an hour later, and would have visited every room on the way. It also had roots actually protruding through the block wall basement into the interior, some of them an easy 4" to 5" in diameter. Believe it or not, they got $57,000.00 for that dump, and a young couple moved into it. Personally, I didn't think it was fit for use as a chicken coop, let alone human habitation.
